Ruth Maier

Ruth Maier was born into a middle-class Jewish family in interwar Vienna. Following the Anschluss of Austria in March 1938, the world of the substantial Viennese Jewish community crumbled. In early 1939, her sister having left for England, Ruth emigrated to Norway and lived with a family in Lillestrøm, about thirty miles from Oslo. Norway itself became a Nazi conquest in April 1940, and Ruth was deported to Auschwitz in November 1942, where she was killed on arrival, aged only twenty-two. Ruth’s close friend, the Norwegian poet Gunvor Hofmo kept her diaries and much of her correspondence. After Hofmo’s death in 1995, Jan Erik Vold went through her papers and found Ruth’s diaries. After editing them for ten years, they were published in Norway in 2007.